This cycle’s most vicious turn came in the early 1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon and battered its capital, Beirut, in an ultimately successful, if brutal and costly, effort to chase out Palestinian guerrillas. A decade later, following the Oslo peace accords, many of the same fighters arrived in Palestine itself under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. But again, his inability, or unwillingness, in the eyes of Israelis, to tame a new set of nonstate actors led to large-scale Israeli reprisals, which in turn stripped his government of legitimacy and promoted the rise of more radical, more determined parties such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Like those parties, Hezbollah was a product of conflict. The cultlike intensity of its following was spawned by bitter personal experience of Israeli domination, not only under the direct military occupation of a large swathe of south Lebanon, which lasted between 1978 and 2000, but as a result of frequent Israeli punitive raids, such as the 1996 “Grapes of Wrath” offensive that caused the slaughter of 106 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge at a UN peacekeeping base in the village of Qana. Such memories have allowed Hezbollah to pose as the protector not just of Shias but of Lebanon as a whole, with the argument that its guerrilla force performs a function that the weak Lebanese state and its ill-equipped army are incapable of.
Whatever Israel’s protests, Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, and killing of eight more, on July 12 was clearly a military operation, an act of banditry perhaps, but not of “terrorism.” The most notorious incident associated with the group is the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, which killed 241 US servicemen. But Hezbollah was not formally founded until two years later. Its responsibility for two deadly attacks on Argentina’s Jewish community in the early 1990s is highly likely, but has not been definitively proven. Since then the group has cheered suicide attacks in Israel and the Iraqi resistance, but is not known to have taken part in international terrorism. It condemned the September 11 attacks on the United States and shuns Sunni extremist groups such as al-Qaeda—with good reason, since such groups are often virulently anti-Shia, and Hezbollah takes a relatively enlightened view of issues such as women’s rights. Aside from its military branch, the party fields twelve representatives in Lebanon’s parliament and one cabinet minister, and it runs an impressive number of social services, from schools to hospitals and orphanages.
Even so, from the Israeli perspective, the existence of a potent nonstate force on its northern border has been seen as an intolerable nuisance. This is particularly so since it has been backed by one state, Iran, whose leaders have declared a resolve to destroy Israel, and by another hostile state, Syria, which has used Hezbollah as a prod to remind the world that despite peace deals with other neighboring states, Israel remains in occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights.
Iran and …
